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Comment by quipper | Hacker News Reader

You can simulate this by going to System Preferences-->General-->Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available and unchecking it.

It also makes Retina-class devices look far worse. The fonts on my 5K iMac became much less readable after this change.

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I do not think this is an accurate way to simulate the issue reported. This simulation will look worse than the actual issue, which is not present on 4K+ displays.

Yeah – on Mojave that checkbox still exists and unchecking it still makes fonts look different (less bold).

that's good to know! Then the difference shouldn't be that big on Retina displays.

I just compared on High Sierra and it's mostly that without subpixel AA types look thinner

I confirmed that the issue still exists by installing Mojave beta. The fonts looks terrible -- very thin and blurry.

OS X has never done gamma correction properly with subpixel antialiasing. Instead, it “dilates” the shapes slightly, but this is actually wrong. I suppose half the problem is getting used to the new, correct, line weights. This is more problematic on retina displays because the dilation affected the weight far more than the gamma deviations would’ve at high resolution.

What do you mean by dilation?

This turns off smoothing across pixels, rather than subpixel antialiasing. Not the same thing.

>> It also makes Retina-class devices look far worse. The fonts on my 5K iMac became much less readable after this change.

I actually prefer this setting to be off on Retina screens. You don't need to anti-alias fonts on a 230ppi display.

You might not need it. I do.

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